All right, everyone, it’s soapbox time, and you know I’m serious because I’m using capital letters and punctuation.
Even if you don’t usually like the CW’s superhero shows, even if you normally don’t like superhero shows at all, please go watch the most recent episode of Supergirl, called Man of Steel, which aired October 28, 2018. It’s free on the CW’s website and will stay so for about a month, albeit with ads.
I affectionately call Supergirl “the preachy one” of the CW shows, because it can be a little ham-handed with the aliens-as-oppressed-group metaphor and a lot of rah-rah-rah leftist language. I’m fine with it- they’re generally promoting good ideas- but it’s a bit much, even for me, someone who agrees with them. This season has leaned in even harder on “space aliens are like illegal immigrants” front, with anti-alien violence (and I mean alien as in space alien, not alien as in Douchebag for someone who came here illegally) as our Big Bad’s motivation. It is not subtle at all in the mirroring of nativist rhetoric used against illegal immigrants, especially ones from Central or South America. I came in to “Man of Steel” expecting more of this.
The previous episode had a cliffhanger where someone irradiated the entire atmosphere with Kryptonite, almost killing Supergirl (but she won’t die, because she’s the title character and it’s still a CW show). As the usual protagonists work to save her, Supergirl’s adoptive sister asks, “Who would do something like this?”
Smash cut to the protagonist of this episode, the guy who did something like this. The show spends a solid 35 minutes following this guy through four years of his life. At the beginning, he’s a college professor, mildly accepting of Earth’s alien population, whose father made his living running a steel mill. Every minute spent with this guy serves to illustrate exactly how he became so radicalized as to try to kill Supergirl. Alien metal was the wave of the future, not steel, destroying his father’s livelihood. Alien attacks killed his father and leveled his home. He got fired from his job for complaining about aliens to his class as he taught American history to them.
At every turn, he’s blamed for what’s happening to him. He tries to save an alien from anti-alien violence, but the first responders assume he was a perpetrator, because his father was one of the perpetrators. He goes to Luthorcorp, which originally contracted from his father’s steel mill, to try and save the contract, but Lena Luthor basically says, “Your father should just invest in alien metal instead of steel,” ignoring the expense it takes to convert a mill from manufacturing steel to manufacturing alien metal. He gets pissed, gets radicalized, and slowly slips into perpetrating anti-alien violence and inciting a nativist anti-alien movement.
It’s chilling, honestly, because it’s all played so straight. This could be a white guy, in the real world, becoming radicalized against nonwhite immigrants. I’m downright impressed the CW approved this, because it does not paint the nice liberal heroes of our show in a good light. They’re the bad guys in this episode, at least for those 35 minutes. Every single one of them interacts with him at some point before he’s crossed the line into Outright Racism, and none of them react in any way that’s helpful or productive. When he raises understandable concerns about aliens, they don’t take him seriously, because he sounds super racist. Of course, by the end of the episode, he’s gone off the deep end and is killing people and whatnot (don’t worry, the show doesn’t condone murder) but the show is unabashed about saying, “Look at all these ways our superheroes could have prevented this dude from going to this place, but they didn’t, because they didn’t want to listen to someone who sounds racist. They believed they were the good guys, so they didn’t listen to this person who sounds like a bad guy, and in doing so, enabled his descent into being an actual bad guy.”
CW knows that its audience, for Supergirl at least, is a bunch of liberals (myself included, I want to be very clear). It knows that we don’t like Donald Trump and his kind of rhetoric, and it scores easy points week after week saying, “Wow, that kind of rhetoric is Bad, and no one should do this!” It would be easy for CW to have just done that again this week, giving more rah-rah-rah go-liberals kinds of messages and themes. It’s what I expected. Instead, it spent time- a hell of a lot of time- going into who says this sort of thing, why they say it, how they got there in their lives. Compassion for “the enemy”, the people saying things we find morally repugnant. It’s chilling, it’s amazing, and it reminds its liberal audience that conservatives have reasons for their beliefs. It doesn’t make their beliefs (or actions) justified, but people are rational, and if we don’t treat them like they’re rational, it’s just going to make them angry.
The network had no idea this episode would air after a week of horrific mass violence. The bombs mailed to those critical of the current administration, the attempted shooting at a black church, and the abhorrent mass shooting at a synagogue celebrating the birth of a child. It’s easy, reading about these things in the news, to say, “Who could do such a thing?” I know I asked myself that question half a dozen times in the last few days alone. I’m impressed the CW looked at that question in context of their world, and instead of reducing “those people” into one-dimensional racist stereotypes, provided a nuanced, thoughtful answer.
what i do is not up to you 